ARCHILOCHUS

Archilochus is in many ways the focal point for any discussion of the development of literature in the seventh century, since he is the first Greek writer to take his material almost entirely from what he claims to be his own experience and emotions, rather than from the stock of tradition.

By a happy coincidence this central figure is also precisely datable. He was a contemporary of Gyges, king of Lydia c. 687-652 (fr. 19). He alludes to the destruction of Magnesia by the Cimmerian Treres in or about the latter year (fr. 20), and seems himself to have been of military age at the time. In fr. 122 he speaks of the recent wonder of a total eclipse of the sun, which (despite recent attempts to revive the claims of 711 or 557) must be the eclipse of 6 April 648.

Archilochus the Parian presents himself as a man of few illusions, a rebel against the values and assumptions of the aristocratic society in which he found himself. A plausible explanation of this tension, to which we owe much of the interest of Archilochus' work, is to be found in the circumstances of his life. He came of a notable family. His grandfather (or great-grandfather?) Tellis had joined in taking the cult of Demeter to Thasos towards the end of the eighth century, and was to be immortalized in a great painting at Delphi by the Thasian Polygnotus (Paus. 10.28.3). The poet's father, Telesicles, also won distinction, as the founder of the Parian colony on Thasos.

INTRODUCTION

The development of monodic lyric in the sixth century toward greater variety, expressiveness and flexibility in poets like Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus and Anacreon cannot be documented for choral lyric. Whether because of historical accident, the popularity of monody, or an actual decline in the genre, very little choral poetry is preserved between Stesichorus and Simonides. We have a few lines of Lasus of Hermione (702–6 PMG), who is said to have introduced dithyrambic competitions into Athens under Pisistratus and competed against Simonides (cf. Aristophanes, Wasps 1410f.). He also wrote an asigmatic poem, Centaurs (704 PMG), and a poem on the death of the children of Niobe (706 PMG). A paean by one Tynnichus of Chalcis, perhaps in the sixth century, won the admiration of both Aeschylus and Plato (Ion 534d, 707 PMG), but only a small phrase survives.

Certainly the religious and social occasions for choral poetry did not diminish. On the contrary, musical performances and competitions continued to hold an important place in the cultural life of sixth- and fifth-century Greece, both at public festivals, whether local or Panhellenic, and at the courts and houses of individual tyrants and nobles, an important source of patronage for travelling poets. Hymns, paeans, dithyrambs and partheneia continued to be performed at religious celebrations, while enkomia, dirges, marriage-songs and victoryodes were commissioned by rulers or nobles for private festivities. Many of these latter, as we shall see in the case of Pindar, would be public in nature, a display of munificence affirming the donor's high standing in the community.

THE NATURE OF EARLY CHORAL POETRY

From Alcman in the seventh century to Timotheus at the beginning of the fourth, choral lyric remains an important literary form. Performed by citizen choruses — men, boys, women, or girls — as well as by guilds of professionals, these poems were sung by a dancing chorus at public religious festivals or at important family events like weddings or funerals. Because the festivals in honour of the gods also celebrated the civic life of the polis, choral song played a major role in affirming the values and solidarity of the community. The connexion between music and ethical values, in fact, remains strong through the archaic and classical periods. Like much of early Greek poetry, choral lyric is public rather than personal in outlook, expression and orientation. In this respect it differs from monodic lyric, which is much more an expression of personal emotion.

The basic forms and sub-genres of choral lyric are already attested in Homer and doubtless reach back long before the literary evidence. The Shield of Achilles in the Iliad describes a marriage song (hymenaios, II. 18.491–6), a harvest song accompanied by dancing (18.569–72), and an elaborate performance of dance and song by youths and maidens at Cnossus (18.590–606). In the Odyssey the bard Demodocus sings the famous song about the illicit love of Ares and Aphrodite while all around him the young Phaeacians dance to its rhythm (8.262ff.). These passages imply a close interconnexion of music, dance and poetry in choral lyric.

XENOPHON

The striking and unusual personality of Socrates attracted much attention among the Athenians of the later fifth century, and brought him many admirers. But his influence was exerted by his conversation, not by any writing, so that posterity knew him only through the literature that sprang up, as enemies attacked him and friends attempted, often using dialogue form, to present the man they had known. Of this literature the work of Plato and Xenophon is all that survives, apart from some fragments of Aeschines of Sphettus. Plato, it is certain, made Socrates express philosophic views he never held; at times he became Plato's mouthpiece. Xenophon's Socrates, on the other hand, is hardly a philosopher at all; he gives good practical advice and sets an inspiring example of personal conduct. Plato and Xenophon may have developed different sides of their hero; but, unlike Plato, Xenophon was unable to paint a portrait that could explain the fascination which he had undoubtedly exerted.

There is nothing to show that the young Xenophon knew Socrates well before he joined the expedition of Cyrus in 401. Nor can it be said when he began to write of him; presumably this was not before returning to Greece in 394. His first contribution to Socratic literature was Socrates' defence (Apology). Earlier writers, he says, agreed that at his trial (399 B.C.) Socrates took a high or haughty line, but they failed to explain that he did this to secure his own conviction, knowing that death was better than the deterioration that age must bring.

In classical dramatic traditions there seems to be a recurrent tendency to present serious drama and broad farce in immediate juxtaposition. Much as, for instance, Roman tragedy was followed by exodia (usually consisting of Atellan farce), Japanese No plays by Kyogen, and Elizabethan tragedy by jigs, so for most at least of the fifth century B.C. the three tragedies of a trilogy were followed by a satyr play, composed by the same author, the only known exception being Euripides' Alcestis of 438 B.C. presented instead of a satyr play and therefore termed a ‘prosatyric’ play. Most satyr plays were lost in antiquity; only Euripides' Cyclops survives in the manuscript tradition. Modern papyrus discoveries, however, have greatly increased our knowledge of the genre.

The principal features of the satyr play were:

1. Invariable use of a chorus of satyrs; these are small rustic creatures, half-goat, half-human, elemental and often comically grotesque. They are regularly accompanied by their father Silenus, who is a dramatic character in his own right but also functions as a choral spokesman.

2. Use of mythological plots, with mythological travesty a principal source of humour.

3. Absence of satire of contemporary people and events, overt or covert.

4. Use of the same language, metres, and dramaturgic resources as tragedy, modified by special generic requirements: occasional colloquial and bawdy language, boisterous dances, etc. There is somewhat greater metrical freedom than in tragedy: Porson's Law is sometimes disregarded and cyclic anapaests outside the first place in the iambic line are admitted.

5. ...

THE EARLY EMPIRE: GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, LITERARY CRITICISM

Strabo

After the defeat of Antony at Actium in 31 B.C. and the fall of Alexandria in the next year, the eastern and western parts of the Roman empire quickly recovered from the divisiveness of Rome's civil war; and with the encouragement of the heir of Caesar, soon to be named Augustus, the Graeco-Roman culture of the Mediterranean world renewed itself. Several of the major Greek writers of the Augustan age made their way to Rome in the year 30 B.C. or just a little later.

The geographer Strabo came to Rome in 29 B.C. But Strabo had been there before. Already before the murder of Caesar he had left his native Asia Minor to visit Rome; and for him, as for other Augustan Greek men of letters, Romans were to become the principal patrons. He went to Egypt in the company of the prefect Aelius Gallus, and many years later it was the emperor Tiberius whose accession impelled Strabo, for reasons still obscure, to a new burst of activity. Although Strabo boasts at one point that he has travelled widely, from the Black Sea to Ethiopia and from Armenia to Etruria, it appears that he did little more than get from one place to another without inspecting much on the way. He reveals that he stopped at the island of Gyarus off the coast of Greece, but he seems never to have set foot in Athens. Strabo was a scholar at heart, and he worked from books.

HERODOTUS

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 485–425 B.C.) was the founder of ancient historiography. The paradox of his life is his dual position as a prime exponent both of Ionian story telling and, despite his use of the Ionic dialect, of Attic literature. Athens of course had attracted foreigners already in the sixth century (the Samian Anacreon is an example) and continued to do so in the fifth. But in Herodotus she acquired a writer who explained her achievements and her way of life to the Greek world at large. Like Achilles, Athens had found her Homer.

Herodotus was a descendant of an aristocratic family in Halicarnassus, which appears to have had some Carian admixture. His father's name is given as Lyxus, and the poet Panyassis, author of a poem on Heracles, was a relation; both names sound Carian. We are told by the ancient tradition, but not by Herodotus himself, that he fought the local tyrant, a descendant of Queen Artemisia, celebrated for her exploits in the Persian War, was exiled, and spent some time on Samos, with which he shows in fact a fairly close acquaintance. The ancient biography is silent about his further career except for saying that he went to the Athenian colony of Thurii in southern Italy, where his tomb was shown in the market place. This tradition is reflected in our text of the Histories; according to the manuscript tradition, Herodotus describes himself as a citizen of Halicarnassus in the opening sentence, but ‘of Thurii’ is an early variant and may well have been what Herodotus wrote.

‘Who could speak highly enough of training in the art of writing?’ asks the historian Diodorus (12.13.2). ‘By this means alone the dead speak to the living, and through the written word those who are widely separated in space communicate with those remote from them as if they were neighbours.’ The quarter-millennium from c. 730 to c. 480 in Greece was a period in which literacy came to have far-reaching effects on literature, making possible an infinitely complex network of relationships between authors remote from one another in time or space or both, and allowing the development of a single unified literary culture, to which local differences only added richness. For it is no coincidence that as literacy spread there came a growing consciousness of national identity, the universal Greekness of all who spoke and wrote the common tongue. This capital event, the re-invention of writing, was itself, moreover, only one element among many in the great renaissance of Greece which came from the rediscovery of the wider world after centuries of isolation — centuries in which, following the collapse of the literate Mycenaean culture between 1200 and 1100, all the fine arts and delicate skills of the Bronze Age had been forgotten and all that remained was the memory of great deeds and great heroes, enshrined in the traditional forms of oral poetry and chanted to precarious settlements of refugees on the coastal fringe of Asia Minor.

It makes sense to begin a discussion of the period of Greek literacy with Hesiod, not because there is any certainty that he was a literate poet — in fact there is much to be said for the view that he worked in a tradition of formular oral poetry which was fairly closely akin to Homer's — but because he was doing something new and individual which pointed the way that subsequent Greek poetry was to take.

With the possible exception of Heliodorus (see above, p. 696), the active careers of the writers discussed in this volume all came to a close before the end of the third century A.D. This does not mean, of course, that Greek literary production stopped; on the contrary, expert estimates of the word-count for extant Greek literature run at about 19,000,000 for the period up to A.D. 200 and 70,000,000 for the next four centuries. But little of what was written in Greek after the middle of the third century A.D. can be considered ‘classical’ in any sense of that elastic term, and most of it hardly qualifies as ‘literature’ at all.

The middle years of the third century were a critical period in which many must have doubted that Graeco-Roman civilization could long survive.

The administrative, military and financial chaos which resulted from this anarchy encouraged the inroads of the barbarian peoples who had long been threatening (and infiltrating) the Roman frontier: Sassanian Persia to the east overran Roman territory as far as Antioch (and in 260 captured the Emperor Valerian), while to the north and west Goths and Franks broke the barriers of the Danube and the Rhine, to bring devastation to the Balkans, Greece, Gaul and Spain.

THE LATER ACADEMY AND THE PERIPATOS (LYCEUM)

When Theophrastus formally established the Peripatetic school or Lyceum, following Aristotle's death, Athens possessed two centres of philosophy, for the Platonic Academy, now under its third head, Xenocrates, had continued without interruption. The activities of the Academy during this period are very poorly documented, but they seem to have concentrated upon systematizing Plato's thought at a time when Aristotle and his immediate successors were engaged upon new researches over a much wider front. It is possible that Xenocrates and his associates began the interpretation of Plato which, centuries later, culminated in the complex metaphysics of Plotinus. For three hundred years, following Plato, the Academy had an uninterrupted Athenian tradition, but it contributed little of substance to Greek literature. The most important Academic philosophers, Arcesilaus (died 242/1) and Carneades (died 129/8), were Sceptics who wrote nothing, though their work, especially Carneades', was well enough known at secondhand to be used by Cicero in his Academica and much later by Sextus Empiricus (see p. 636). Antiochus of Ascalon, in the first century B.C., turned the Academy back to a positivist philosophy, synthesized from traditional Academic teaching and Stoic views. He was known to Cicero, whose philosophical writings contain many explicit reports of his position.

Our knowledge of the early Peripatetics is much better, and certainly sufficient to show that they maintained Aristotle's own interests, including the study of literature. We are best informed about Theophrastus, a scholar of quite remarkable range and energy. His surviving work, a tiny fraction of his total output, is mainly on scientific subjects (especially botany), which he treats in very much the same manner as Aristotle.

THE CYCLIC EPICS

Homer and Hesiod, as the sole survivors of the earliest age of Greek literature, have conveyed such an impression of uniqueness that it requires some effort to recall that they were by no means without rivals and imitators. The formulaic nature of their verse, which implies a common bardic tradition, the recitations of Phemius and Demodocus in the Odyssey, and the occasion of Hesiod's competition at Chalcis all suggest that the eighth century was a period of lively poetic activity. When at Od. 12.70 the good ship Argo is said to be ‘of interest to all’, that surely alludes to some well-known treatment of the story of the Argonauts; and the brief résumé of Oedipus' story at Od. 11.271–80 must recall a more extended treatment elsewhere. We know that many early epic poems in fact survived from the archaic period alongside the works of Homer and Hesiod; at some (unknown) stage they were grouped into a sequence or ‘cycle’ starting at the remotest of beginnings with a Theogony and a Battle of the Titans and running through the legends of Thebes and the Trojan War. They were performed by professional reciters (rhapsodes) in competitions at festivals, and must have been widely known until at least well into the fifth century. Probably the term ‘cycle’ was originally used of most epic narrative poetry, Homeric and non-Homeric alike; it was only after the time of Aristotle that ‘cyclic’ meant something essentially different from ‘Homeric’.

THE ORIGINS OF TRAGEDY

The documented history of Greek tragedy begins in 472 B.C. with Aeschylus' Persae. Of his earlier career we know little; we know something but not much about one or two of his contemporaries; we have a date (536/533) for the institution of a competition in tragedy at the Great Dionysia. The origins of tragedy lie in the sixth century. So complex, however, and so obscure is the evidence, so various are the theories advanced, that the hardened scholar approaches this subject with dismay.

The surviving plays of Aeschylus tell us what needs to be explained. There is a chorus, dramatized as the play demands. Their songs are elaborate and bulk large and, in pre-Aeschylean tragedy, may have bulked larger, since Aristotle informs us that Aeschylus reduced the choral element and ‘gave the leading role to the spoken word’. For the earlier plays two actors are required (either of whom could, with a change of mask and costume, take more than one part). Aeschylus is said himself to have added the second actor and either he or Sophocles the third, and Aeschylus uses three in his later plays. The actors deliver speeches, often of considerable length and formality, but also enter into dialogue with the coryphaeus (chorus-leader) or with the other actor. Particularly characteristic are passages of line-by-line interchange (stichomythia) which, like the narrative speech, remains a formal convention of tragedy as long as we know it and may well go back to its earliest beginnings. The plays (except Agamemnon) are of moderate length, rather over 1,000 lines. In what kind of performances did plays like these originate?

PHILOSOPHICAL POETS AND HERACLITUS

Three early Greek philosophers were poets, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles. Heraclitus, who lived at about the same time, was a philosopher whose prose is stylistically unique in Greek literature. These are the earliest philosophical writers whose work, though fragmentary, has been preserved in some quantity. It would have been possible for them to express their thought in a ‘simple and economical’ prose, as Anaximenes, who was older than any of them, is reputed to have done (Diog. Laert. 2.3). But Anaximenes is one of the first Greeks who is known to have written a book in prose. His philosophical predecessor at Miletus, Anaximander, did so too, and Theophrastus commented on the ‘somewhat poetical’ style of his single extant fragment (DK12 A 9). There is no reason to suppose that the philosophical poets surprised their contemporaries by declining to follow a prose tradition of such recent origin.

Equally, however, their use of verse rather than prose was deliberate. Each of the philosopher poets must be considered as an individual writer, but it may be significant that Parmenides and Empedocles (and Xenophanes during his later years) belonged not to Ionia but to the western Greek world of southern Italy and Sicily. Parmenides ‘wrote as a philosophical pioneer of the first water’ and probably confined his recognition of the prose philosophers of Ionia to critical rejection of their views. The Ionian philosophers (excluding Xenophanes) differentiated themselves from traditional authorities by writing in prose. As hexameter poets Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles placed themselves in a line which had Homer and Hesiod as its illustrious founders.

THE BEGINNINGS OF LITERARY ORATORY

Discourse appears in Greek literature from the very beginning as a characteristic feature of Greek life. The debates of Iliad 1 and 2, the embassy of Iliad 9, and the pathetic appeal of Priam in Iliad 24 were often cited by later rhetoricians, while the comparison in the Iliad (3.212–24) of the oratory of Odysseus and Menelaus shows a critical awareness of style and delivery at the dawn of European literature. The poets continued to include speeches in their works. Important stages in rhetorical history are the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, which has apparently the earliest instance (line 265) of argument from probability, the major logical tool of Greek oratory, and the trial scene in Aeschylus' Eumenides, which reflects judicial procedure in Athens just before the emergence of literary oratory.

In the second half of the fifth century oratory became a literary genre in its own right. We have orations by Gorgias, Antiphon and Andocides and testimony from Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato and other writers. In order, however, to understand literary oratory it is necessary first to review the developing role of public speaking in fifth-century political and intellectual life.

Both Greek rhetorical theory and self-conscious techniques of oratory seem to be a product of democracy as it developed in Athens after the Persian Wars, especially after the reforms of Ephialtes (462 B.C.), and in Syracuse when democracy replaced tyranny (467 B.C.). According to tradition, rhetoric was ‘invented’ by a Sicilian named Corax who taught Syracusans involved in litigation before democratic courts how to argue from the probabilities of their situation.